Alex Glasgow

One of the proudest moments in the life of Alex Glasgow, who has died aged 65 after a long illness, at his home in Fremantle, Western Australia, was when he heard a miner on the radio saying: "It's like the old song says... 'Close the Coalhouse Door, lads, there's blood inside'..."

The reason for his pride was simple: it wasn't an old song. Alex, a pitman's son from Gateshead, wrote it originally for a radio programme, and it later became the title song for the 1968 stage musical which Alex and I wrote, in partnership with the novelist and short story writer, Sid Chaplin.

It's one of many songs that have an enduring place in the psyche of the north-east and the Labour movement. There are probably a few old comrades in Sedgefield who can sing My Daddy Is A Left-wing Intellectual or The Socialist ABC:

A is for Alienation, that made me the man that I am

And B's for the Boss who's a Bastard, a bourgeois who don't give a damn...

Alex was, in the words of his long-time friend and associate, Henry Livings, a supreme songmaker, but he was much else besides: a broadcaster on radio and television, a writer, a singer, a socialist and, to quote another of his songs, a proper man. He started his career in forces broadcasting and once had a record in the German charts, an experience echoed when his recording of Dance To Thi Daddy - the theme music of the BBC series, When The Boat Comes In, for which he wrote some memorable episodes - made it to the charts.

This revealed Alex at his most characteristic. He refused resolutely to go on Top of the Pops, or do guest shots on any television variety shows. "I'm not a bloody commodity," he said. Once, prior to an ideologically-acceptable appearance on television with Henry Livings, he was appalled when a make-up girl tried to cut his hair "to match the picture in the Radio Times".

"Leave my hair alone," he said. "I do not have a public image."

He was highly principled and wonderfully combative. I once said to him: "Alex - I think I'm the only one of your friends you've never had a row with," and he didn't disagree.

But friends and colleagues were united in admiration of his unique talent. In the theatre he collaborated with Stan Barstow and Henry Livings, and wrote Joe Lives, a wonderful one-man show for John Woodvine, about the great 19th-century Tyneside radical and songwriter, Joe Wilson. This work revealed the huge range in Alex's musical palette, from angry polemic to knees-up music-hall to love songs of surpassing tenderness: In The Night There Is A Garden, The Harlequin and Sally Wheatley are as lovely as anything written in the last 40 years. The obvious explanation is that they were inspired by a 40-year love affair with his wife, Paddy.

As a performer, maybe the most accurate description of him was chansonnier. He was multi-lingual and once spent an evening with Jake Thackray trying to work out the joke in a key verse of a Georges Brassens' song before making the triumphant discovery that the tag line was sung in French, but with a Belgian accent.

He figured if he was doing his job properly, he should always be in trouble. One year in the 1970s, when the Tories were having their conference in Blackpool, the delegates awoke to Alex's sweet tones singing on a North Region radio programme:

I'm going to sell a little bomb to South Africa

Just a teeny-weeny bomb to South Africa...

Questions were asked, Alex's head rolled, and several of his associates on the programme left in sympathy, out of old-fashioned solidarity: those were the days.

But even his nearest and dearest were shocked when, in 1981, he left his native Gateshead and moved to Fremantle. The year before, he and Henry Livings had appeared at the Perth Festival in their legendary road show, The Northern Drift, and Alex fell in love with the place.

He and Paddy celebrated their 20th wedding anniversary in mid-air on their way to a new life. He justified the move with his special brew of unchallengeable assertions. "They're wonderful people. They're all like Geordies. And do you realise, 70% of the world's wild flowers are in Western Australia?" His Letters from a Pom, and Henry Livings's replies, were a regular feature in the Guardian during the early period of his migration.

The last few years of his life were cursed with illness of a particularly cruel nature. He went bravely but not gently. Gentle wasn't his style, except within the family. He lived long enough to take photographs of his first grandchild.

He is survived by Paddy, and by his children, Richard, Daniel and Ruth.